Yes we can! And it was just demonstrated. And it seems to have some bipartisan support.
The technology used was actually developed the oil and gas industry, but Elizabeth Muller understands that it could dispose of nuclear waste as well. The Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Deep Isolation knows this is a great way to dispose of this small, but bizarre, waste stream.
Deep Isolation is a recent start-up company from Berkeley by Muller and her father, Richard, that seeks to dispose of nuclear waste safely at a much lower cost than existing strategies. The idea of Deep Borehole Disposal for nuclear waste is not new, but Deep Isolation is the first to consider horizontal wells and is the first to actually demonstrate the concept.
The technology takes advantage of recently developed drilling technologies to place nuclear waste in a series of two-mile-long tunnels, a mile below the Earth’s surface, where they’ll be surrounded by a very tight rock known as shale. Shale is so tight that it took these new technologies to get any oil or gas out of it at all.
As geologists, we know how many millions of years it takes for anything to get up from that depth in the Earth’s crust.
So what better way to use this technology than to put something back in that you want to stay there for geologic time. The demonstration occurred on January 16th, when Deep Isolation placed and retrieved a waste canister from thousands of feet underground.
This first-of-its kind demonstration was witnessed by Department of Energy officials, nuclear scientists and industry professionals, investors, environmentalists, local citizens, and even oil & gas professionals since this uses their new drilling technologies. No radioactive material was used in the test, and the location was not one where actual waste would be disposed.
Over 40 observers from multiple countries looked on as a prototype nuclear waste canister, designed to hold highly radioactive nuclear waste but filled with steel to simulate the weight of actual waste, was lowered over 2000 feet deep in an existing drillhole using a wireline cable, and then pushed using an underground tractor into a long horizontal storage section.
The canister was released and the tractor and cable withdrawn. Several hours later, the tractor was placed back in the hole, where it latched and retrieved the canister, bringing it back to the surface.
This is not just an exercise for the student. The cost of our nuclear and radioactive waste programs keeps rising astronomically. The Department of Energy recently projected the cost for their cleanup to be almost $500 billion, up over $100 billion from its estimate just a year earlier. Most of that cost is for the Hanford Site in Washington State where weapons waste that used to be high-level is no longer high-level.
The Government Accountability Office considers even that amount to be low-balled, as do I. Just look at the highly-fractured, variably saturated, dual-porosity volcanic tuff at Yucca Mountain with highly oxidizing groundwater which sits on the edge of the Las Vegas Shear Zone. Yucca Mountain was supposed to hold all of our high-level weapons waste and our commercial spent fuel.
The original estimate for that project was only $30 billion, but ever since we found out that we picked the wrong rock in 1987, the cost has skyrocketed beyond $300 billion. This is twice as high as could ever be covered by the money being set aside for this purpose, in the Nuclear Waste Fund, and it is unlikely Congress will ever appropriate the extra money to complete it.
The primary reason for the increasing costs are outdated plans that use technologies that are overly complicated and untested, and strategies that are overkill for the actual risks. Especially since the waste itself has changed its radioactivity dramatically through radioactive decay from the time when they began filling these waste tanks 70 years ago.
The hottest components of radioactive waste have half-lives of 30 years or less. Most of this stuff is only a fraction as hot as it was when it was formed.
“We’re using a technique that’s been made cheap over the last 20 years,” says the elder Muller, who is also a physicist and climate change expert at UC Berkeley. “We could begin putting this waste underground right away.”
Like all leading climate scientists, the Mullers now argue that the world must increase its use of nuclear energy to slow climate change and realize that solving the nuclear waste problem would help a lot.
When it comes to finding a permanent home for nuclear waste, the two biggest hurdles Deep Isolation, and everyone else, has observed is public consent and bipartisan agreement. The bipartisan nature of this particular effort is reflected in the company’s advisory board and public support from experts on both sides of the aisle.
Deep Isolation’s Advisory Board has a variety of industry leaders in nuclear and other fields, including Robert Bunditz and David Lochbaum, generally considered anti-nuclear watchdogs of the industry.
Furthermore, two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Steven Chu and Arno Penzias, an Emmy award winner, David Hoffman, and professionals from both sides of the aisle like Ed Fuelner of the Heritage Foundation and Daniel Metlay from the Carter Administration, sit on their Board.
Public consent just takes time and lots of meetings with state and local officials and the public wherever you think the project would work. And we have lots and lots of deep tight shales in America way below any drinking water aquifers.
Elizabeth Muller emphasized that “Stakeholder engagement is where our solution began. To prepare for this public demonstration, we met with national environmental groups, as well as local leaders, to listen to concerns, incorporate suggestions, and build our solution around their needs and our customers’.”
In 2019, Deep Isolation is focused on both the U.S. and the international markets for nuclear waste disposal. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are about 400 thousand tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel waste temporarily stored in pools and dry casks at hundreds of sites around the world.
No country has an operational geological repository for spent fuel disposal, although France, Sweden and Finland are well along on their plan to open one. The United States does have an operating deep geological repository for transuranic weapons waste at the WIPP Site near Carlsbad, New Mexico, which was actually designed and built to hold all of our nuclear waste of any type.
